Slashdot Mirror
Audit Approved of Facebook Policies, Even After Cambridge Analytica Leak (nytimes.com)
Nicholas Confessore reports via The New York Times: An auditing firm responsible for monitoring Facebook for federal regulators told them last year that the company had sufficient privacy protections in place, even after the social media giant lost control of a huge trove of user data that was improperly obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The assertion, by PwC, came in a report submitted to the Federal Trade Commission in early 2017. The report, a redacted copy of which is available on the commission's website, is one of several periodic reviews of Facebook's compliance with a 2011 federal consent decree, which required Facebook to take wide-ranging steps to prevent the abuse of users' information and to inform them how it was being shared with other companies. The accounting firm, formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, effectively gave Facebook a clean bill of health. "Facebook's privacy controls were operating with sufficient effectiveness to provide reasonable assurance to protect the privacy" of users, said the assessment, which stretched from February 2015 to February 2017. But during that period, Facebook was aware that a researcher based in Britain, Aleksandr Kogan, had provided Cambridge Analytica with private Facebook data from millions of users.
how do we regulate the regulators?
I am happy to report to you that the trade war with China is on the full swing
1. ZTE will file bankruptcy in a few weeks
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2018/04/17/how-the-u-s-export-ban-effectively-bankrupts-chinas-telecom-giant-zte/2/#7da1fe0b4089
2. Trump will declare a national emergency to ban all China's investment in USA
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-19/u-s-weighs-emergency-powers-to-curb-tech-investments-by-china
Fuck Zuck.
Maybe a kike had some sort of kike connection for tax purposes?
Problems: 1) auditors are paid by the auditees, 2) they do their job, what they were asked for, and not more. Why do you think these audit / consultancy firms are that expensive? An audit, done to reveal the kind of recent leaks, would only truly work if done by a public institution.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Having participated in many 'audits' from SAS 99 to ISO 27001, I can tell you that the auditors primary job is to give a clean report to their customers, the ones being audited. Auditors mostly go with what their customers are willing to tell them and the 'challenge' questions are really weak and easy to pass.
At a former company that dealt in information security, engineers often copied customer data to their unencrypted laptop so that it was more convenient for them to work. After 3 years of giving mild verbal warnings the auditor finally gave a 'strong' verbal warning that he should really write it down in his report but would give him a verbal one just one more time. The same behavior continued and the verbal warnings stayed verbal.
PwC : The customer puts the cash in my brown paper bag.
Customer: Done. Please, stamp compliance document.
PwC: Done. Have a nice day.
Isn't that how they work?
... if it not comprehensive
I used to work with Moody, an international recognize firm which stresses its independence
The audits that we had carried out must not do favor for any party, and must be comprehensive, over and beyond what has been described in the jobscope
Often we dug through many outside sources about the real nature of the client we were about to audit, before we even accepted them as a client
The technical term for this is "indulgence".
The Cambridge Analytica leak shows us that Facebook has surprisingly no clue or hold on their assets. If user data is the product, that product is freely harvested by third parties outside the control of Facebook.
Right. So this is like how Carillion (a big construction conglomerate in the UK) became insolvent just months after KPMG had given them the green light in an audit (for which they took millions in fees). Or how the various ratings agencies gave CDOs investment grade ratings despite them being based on total junk.
I mean, it is just a sort of formalised corruption at this point. In south east asian they do it with brown paper bags under the table, over here they just buy the politicians so that what they are doing is fully 'legal' in the sense that it doesn't break any of the laws they have paid to get written.
At least in Asia there is some semblance of equality in that the intrinsic power structure is weakened at all levels by corruption (a regular prole can still buy off the local cop). In the west the rigid formalised power structure means that only those at the top get all the benefits of 'flexible' rules while the rest of us are kept under the thumb.
who paid for it, Facebook or the FTC?
Security audits and privacy audits are utterly useless for this case....Is the data secure? Is it private? The answer is no, and an audit like this is merely saying "we tried" even though in reality they weren't trying, they just wanted cya ability in court.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The right wing flamewars are getting very boring.
Grow up and open your eyes. There are important problems that need solving.
Even if they are properly audited, the situation stays the same.. their business model relies on collecting users data for advertising purposes.
The answer? Stop giving it to them and delete your account. Otherwise data will always be collected.
This will likely get downvoted but auditors exist base on one thing - trust. It's literally their bond. Any auditor that accepts a bribe effectively ends their career and if it can be proven their company had to have known their findings were false, they too will face the wrath. Can't get much worse if Facebooks case unless the US Senate fails to take any action against them and it's proven Facebook paid for it.
Although IT tends to laugh at them, audits are still a legally binding "thing" within some sectors. The last thing PwC or any other auditor wants is their own operations being investigated. This just opened a whole other can of worms. About time too.
that make out that they are 'social media'.
If millions and millions stop using them then their advertisers will take their corrupt $$$ elsewhere. Perhaps in time they might start to think about ethical advertising.
Until then FB and the like are blocked at my Firewall and All adverts are blocked in my browsers.
Go F**k yourself Zuck and company.
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
These firms are literally paid to cover shit up.
I've worked with all of them, and they are all well-educated prostitutes who do nothing but provide a veneer of credibility. Anyone remember Arthur Andersen?
After all we've seen, it is as clear as a bell how wrong the audit is. Just because Silicon Valley people can write some code (nothing special nowadays) they feel masters of the known universe... and they are simply a bunch of **sholes caught red handed.
The article and post play into the usual misunderstandings of what a true external audit is. A auditor NEVER gives a clean bill of health to ANYONE.
It would be the equivalent of saying "My 14 year old daughter is incapable of lying!" Or to hit closer to this group "This networked system is totally secure for the next 10 years!" No, those are stupid! Any competent IT guy would say "This system has all the latest patches and best industry practices to remain secure." They would check a few patches and see if they were applied quickly enough to come to that conclusion.
An auditor collects enough information from a client for an owner of the firm to provide a SECONDARY agreeing or decenting OPINION of the company's financial or security or operational position. The company can say "We are going bankrupt." and the auditor will say "I think they are right!"
operating with sufficient effectiveness to provide reasonable assurance
The key words that you will find in almost all audit work is "sufficient effectiveness" and "reasonable assurance". Which is complete true in this situation. Facebook doesn't have policies that give your data out to anyone. They don't violate their policies by doing such. A partner did really go above and beyond what they should have. Facebook failed to regulate such partner but may have had reasonable measures to prevent abuse.
Also, keep in mind that auditors are not here to catch the client in lies, nor catch collusion between people (reportee buys a car, mgr approves, they sell & split profits).
Basically the article is "Auditors did their job but it wasn't enough to prevent this."
So it doesn't look to me like the auditors weren't doing their job, it looks like they did their job, helped uncover what happened, and were still able to give Facebook the thumbs up because they had already fixed the problem months before the audit began.
This is the same PWC that theoretically audited AIG before they went belly up with the financial crash. They also "audited" JPMC and then was fined for basically not doing their job. Seriously, PWC is who you hire when you want to report results without actually doing an audit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Those of us old enough remember the Arthur Andersen debacle only too well. The modus operandi is always the same: the companies carrying out the audit, usually requested by the companies being audited, simply do like the proverbial $25 whore.
Do none of these NYTimes twats know the word "scraping"? They seem Hell bent on trying to make what occurred appear like some l33t hacking operation.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
If you've hired a "Big Accounting Firm", you've already failed. Alll those sleazeballs that advertise on the Sunday political shows? Do not hire them. Not ever. For anything. People who know, don't hire BDO. Or PWC, or any of the other "Big 4" Sleaze Firms.
It shows Facebook doing business as usual. They knew about this in 2012 and did not care.
User data isn't the product user attention is.
User data, is used to facilitate the process of marketing user attention, but the actual product is the ability to put an ad where someone (ideally somone who might be interested in the ad) will actually see it.
A third party who scrapes Facebook's data but doesn't have facebook's users logging in hourly hasn't become a competitor tp Facebook.
Zuck bribed a majority of courts' panel of judges (by political contributions as Jew PACS do). He still had to apologize!
Mark Zuckerberg who STOLE facebook's code from the Winklevoss twins (who dusted him in court on it) calling his users "DUMB FUCKS" & spied on his collegiate classmates via 'fakebook', home of bots and spying/tracking you, now in court FRYING (rightfully so).
Khazar Talmudic Jews (zuck = jew) believe this of all they call goyim/gentiles (any non-jew): Jews = biggest racists of all for which they "jew guilt" you for no less! They're hypocrites known as thieves all thru history or were these nations banishing them a lie? Argentines in 1940 under Peron, France (1306), Egypt (despoiled/robbed by jews), Arabs (pre & post 1948), England (1330 Edward longshanks), Romans under titus, Russia pogroms, Spanish inquistion & Spain 1492 and Germany who got rid of them from their nations nazi german's too? No. Driven into DESERTS ages ago! Don't wonder why after all those exilings above. Should anyone doubt any of this see Jacob Javits' crony Rosenthal spill the beans on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4zMVZ8HnFI/ where he called all Christianity fools for helping Israel and the biggest scam of all time per their beliefs below from their Talmud. This is the province of the synagogue of Satan (Pharisees whom Jesus Christ himself kicked to the curb out of the temple & they killed him for it. Jeremiah did the same to them also + the Essenes could not stand them either breaking away from the pharisee corruption):
Maria Abramovic satanist spirit cooker pal of Hillary Clinton the Voodoo queen is a jew https://www.google.com/search?...
Like Hillary Clinton's mentor Saul Alinsky author of rules for radicals book dedicated to Lucifer
John Podesta Hillary's pal again, is another JUDE with a pedophile brother (both = satanists too imo).
"Most Jews do not like to admit it, but our god is Lucifer â" so I wasnâ(TM)t lying â" and we are his chosen people. Lucifer is very much aliveâ Harold Rosenthal http://www.thetruthseeker.co.u...
Jewish rabbi openly admits to satan worship use white children's blood they kill for passover bread (which THIS video covers in detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU8Y1743QoY/ & how they ran the black slave trade + how they say a prayer to KILL US ALL (goyim) during passover), infiltrating and subverting the catholic church, creating the Jesuit order https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
or https://www.youtube.com/watch?... too!
Barbara Spectre, a jew, tells everyone it's jews orchestrating the muslim migrant problem in Europe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFE0qAiofMQ/ . No migrant raping of women in Poland. Tons in Sweden. Do the math. Use common-sense. This is to get muslims and other goyim/gentiles to wipe one another out as incompatible cultures that will clash and always have.
Rabbi A. Finkelstein ADMITS their greatest enemies are ARABS and WHITES (blacks too) whom they wish to kill one another in a 'theater of war' which they find AMUSING https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Finkelstein also admits JEWS DID 9/11 (perpetrated by the Mossad & Bebe Netanyahu of ISRAEL) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... profiti
It didn't audit as a "leak" because it WASN'T A LEAK?
This was the facebook API working essentially as intended. To a malign purpose (ie helping Trump) and to a degree in excess of what the researcher was expected to pull, but this was in no sense someone 'hacking' fb's systems to get information that wasn't intended to be collected somehow.
-Styopa